'A very nice man'

André was one of those not so many Reuter managers - Mike Nelson and David Ure were among others - who took a genuine interest in how Reuters news bureaux operated and what life was like for the correspondents who worked in them.

Although we met only rarely and on the fringes of editorial business meetings, and although the Soviet Union did not strictly come under his umbrella, he never failed to subject me to a friendly grilling on the state of Moscow bureau’s relations with the authorities and how our journalists coped with living in a still (in the late 1970s) broadly hostile environment. It was not just show - he knew who the Reuter Moscow people were without being told, and sometimes what stories they had been reporting.

David Ure mentions André’s enjoyment of prandial delights, but his table guests were not exclusively from the circles normally “entertained” by Reuter managers. In London at the end of the 1970s on a purely editorial visit from Moscow with my then eight-year-old daughter in tow, I had a call from his office. “I hear you’re here with a young lady,” said André. “Perhaps she’d like to join us for a small dinner tonight. You too, of course.” Throughout the evening she had plenty of his attention, and on the way back to the hotel she confided: “Daddy, that was a very nice man.” ■